Cindi Leive, editor-in-chief of
Glamour, was searching for the best way to draw readers’ attention to an article in the
November 2011 issue about how women could better organize their closets and bank accounts.

“12 ways to get your act together” didn’t have much punch. “12 ways to get your stuff together”
also fell flat. So she decided to change the word
act to something a little vulgar and waited for the angry letters to pour in. They never
came.

“It appeared I was the last person on planet Earth to care about it,” Leive said of the decision
to put an expletive on a magazine cover.“It has not been an issue.”

The long-running debate in women’s magazines — how frank can they be? — seems to have shifted as
editors are sprinkling more curse words on their covers.

“The culture has changed, so we’ve changed,” Leive said. “It’s how our main staff, many who are
under 30, talk. Certain words have gone from being shocking to being neutered.”

Other editors say they haven’t received the complaints they expected from readers, nor have they
seen a drop in sales because of language. They suspect that magazines are merely catching up with
other media.

“Television is probably more accurate in reflecting how people are actually speaking right now,”
said Joanna Coles, editor-in-chief of
Cosmopolitan, who has deliberated when to use vulgar words in her present job and before
as editor-in-chief of
Marie Claire.

For many years, women’s magazines simply didn’t allow any strong language, said Bonnie Fuller, a
former editor of
Cosmopolitan and
Us Weekly.

Robin Lakoff, a linguistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said foul
language by women had long been considered “dangerous” because these words “express anger and act
as a substitute for a physical expression of anger.”It’s now more acceptable for women to curse,
she added, and for men to express emotion, as President Barack Obama did when he grew tearful when
speaking about the school shootings in Newtown, Conn.

“Women can say bad words, in movies, cable TV and writing,” Lakoff wrote by email.Men not only
can shed tears, she added, “but are celebrated for doing so.”

Celebrities also seem to be latching onto the trend.Linda Wells, editor-in-chief of
Allure, said she wouldn’t use curse words in an editor’s letter or on a magazine cover.
But she kept Lady Gaga’s salty quotations about her new perfume — more precisely, about how she
didn’t care about perfume — in an interview in the December issue. In the case of Lady Gaga, Wells
said, “It’s part of conveying a personality.” Replacing expletives with asterisks would have drawn
more attention to the language, she said.

Stronger language has become so prevalent that it is even trickling into the merchandise that
women’s magazines are featuring.Kristin van Ogtrop, managing editor of
Real Simple, said she would include a curse word on the magazine’s cover only “if someone
drugged me and I lost all my faculties.”

But she also recognizes that swearing is now so prevalent that it is difficult to keep it out of
a magazine.

“When you’ve got people like (New York Mayor Michael) Bloomberg cursing in public and (New
Jersey Gov.) Chris Christie cursing in public,” van Ogtrop said, “we have changed as a
culture."